(Re)Making for Life: How can making with used materials create climate resilient change - in practice, in industry, and in communities?

Making Sustainability 2026 De Montfort University
--
An opening keynote talk tracing thirty years of practice — from the first fashion label in the mid 1990s, to where circular design research stands today.
--
The talk moved through four lenses.
1. Rags to Riches looked at how the early studio practice on Brick Lane — hand-printing onto found and secondhand textiles — grew out of economic necessity as much as design intent.
2. Research Agendas traced how that studio practice became funded research: Worn Again, Mistra Future Fashion, Trash-2-Cash, HEREWEAR — and how The TEN, our design strategy tool, emerged from learning to translate practice into shareable methods.
3. Material Systems went deeper into what it actually takes to work with waste cotton, polyester, biobased fibres and industry partners — the negotiation, the life-cycle data, the slow trust-building between designers and scientists.
4. Social Shirts: two decades of shirt-based projects designed with rather than for people. Refashion training for consumers, co-design with activists in Hong Kong Redress, silent portrait-drawing with material scientists, upcycling workshops with primary school children, and — most recently — protest shirts for climate activists (with Sophie Thomas) and the Neurodiverse Design Collective (with Piers Roberts et al, founded Clerkenwell Design Week in May 2026).